What attracts Vitalik, Base founder Jesse, and Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero to ANON? How does it drive clanker and 33bits?

Written by KarenZ, Foresight News

At 09:16 on November 21st, Beijing time, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, exchanged 0.082 ETH (approximately $249.63) for 30,303.464 ANON on the Base network. As a result, ANON rose by over 210% in one hour, and the market capitalization is currently $46 million. Subsequently, Jesse Pollak, the founder of Base, also exchanged 0.333 ETH (approximately $993.41) for 31,529 ANON.

ANON 4-hour K-line chart, Source: DEX Screener

As is well known, Vitalik has always been keen on privacy. What exactly is ANON? Why is it favored by Vitalik, Jesse Pollak, and Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster?

Where does ANON come from?

When it comes to ANON Token, we have to mention Supercast first. Supercast is a Farcaster client that provides an anonymous posting feature called Superanon. Personal subscription to Supercast requires a monthly payment of $10, while team subscription is $30 per month. While Supercast developer woj was asleep, community members used the Superanon feature to post and tag the self-owned AI clanker, and subsequently created the ANON Token. When woj woke up, he said it was a cool thing. However, he also made it clear that he could not fully support this move because any Token of Supercast would be distributed to its users. Therefore, many ANON Token holders in the Farcaster community voluntarily donated over 13 million ANON Tokens valued at over $40,000 at the time (now worth $600,000) to woj, with the aim of redistributing these tokens to Supercast users. As a result, ANON became an anonymous Token, allowing for anonymous posting using ZK proof.

Currently, on Farcaster, posting anonymously requires holding at least 15,000 ANON (dropped this morning, previously 30,000). More advanced features, such as promoting posts on X (formerly Twitter) or deleting posts, require holding at least 1 million ANON. Initially, due to computational complexity, posting and executing other operations may take a few minutes, but now posting on @anoncast only takes about 20 seconds, although the content will only appear on the account 1-2 minutes later.

ANON ignites clanker, 33bits

In a previous article, 'Unprecedented Glory, AI Meme Promising Crypto,' the author mentioned that 'GOAT' LUM on Base is a Token created by AI agent Aethernet on Warpcast through a conversation with clanker (clanker.world) AI agent. At that time, LUM had a Market Cap of $7.8 million, while clanker Token's Market Cap was less than $1.2 million. Today, after 10 days, LUM's Market Cap has risen to $21 million (reaching $80 million on November 15th), and clanker's Market Cap has reached $8.9 million. On clanker, you only need to @clanker on Farcaster and provide the desired Token name, and clanker will automatically reply with the created Token and clanker.world link. Currently, there are 1953 Tokens created through clanker.

Source: Dune

It is worth mentioning that the popularity of ANON has also driven another ZK application called 33bits, which was released a year ago. 33bits is also followed by Dan Romero and allows Farcaster users with FID (Farcaster ID) ≤ 20001 to anonymously post on Warpcast.

When users log in with Warpcast, 33bits will link their FID with the new signer. When posting, users must prove their FID ≤ 20001 through ZK proofs, which are generated using their new signer. The entire process, including authentication and proof generation, is done in the user's browser to maintain the privacy of their FID. After creating the proof, it will be verified on the backend of the application. If the proof is valid, the user's post will be sent to @33bits account via the API and published anonymously. After the clanker launch coin by 33bits yesterday, the current Market Cap has reached $2.7 million.

The name '33bits' is a reference to the concept of '33 Bits of Entropy' by Professor Arvind Narayanan of Princeton University, which claims that it only takes 33 bits of information to de-anonymize an individual. In other words, with only 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information, the identity of one of the 6.6 billion people in the world can be determined.

As Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero put it, AI agents deploying assets on-chain and ZK-driven anonymous group accounts are the two major trends in Farcaster recently.

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